Libertarian started as a word for anarchist communists, not free-market enthusiasts
In 1857 the French anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque wrote a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon using a new word, libertaire. He soon printed a paper of that name in New York City. For a century the term belonged mainly to the anarchist left, long before American free-market thinkers adopted it.
An earlier English usage simply meant a defender of liberty. On 12 February 1796 the London Packet reported that 450 French libertarians had marched out of the prison at Bristol, and in 1802 the word appeared again in a republican sense in a piece criticising a poem. Déjacque's Le Libertaire ran in New York from June 1858 to February 1861. In the mid-1890s Sébastien Faure revived the title in France, just as the Third Republic's so-called villainous laws were banning anarchist publications.
The shift began in the late twentieth century, when many Americans holding classical liberal views started calling themselves libertarians. Murray Rothbard popularised that sense from the 1960s. Robert Nozick carried it into academic philosophy abroad with Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, a reply to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice of 1971, arguing that a minimal state could arise without violating anyone's rights.
The common core is a belief that liberty and personal sovereignty come first. Many libertarians invoke the non-aggression principle: everyone may live as they choose so long as they do not initiate force or fraud against others. A shorthand description, admittedly superficial, is social liberalism combined with fiscal conservatism. Libertarians generally oppose militarism, nationalism and concentrated state power while defending free speech, association and thought.
Beneath that core lies a deep split over property. Left-libertarians favour an egalitarian sharing of natural resources and include anarchist, green and geolibertarian currents, and some free-market anti-capitalists in America deliberately claim the label. Those whom critics call right-libertarians usually reject the prefix, though paleo-libertarians accept a place on the right. Older libertarians such as Herbert Spencer and Max Stirner wanted individuals protected from both government and private ownership, whereas modern American libertarians exempt power exercised through free-market capitalism. Some free-market conservatives still avoid the name altogether because of its associations with the 1960s New Left.
Source: Libertarianism
